it gets caught up in the same logic of futurity thanks to which the world exists in the first place: the gap in which past is redoubled as future. Via possibility and the not-yet, the world endlessly defers its annihilation.
By thinking the end of the world as the end goal—by thinking bliss as producible from within the world—the world is thus reproduced. Not only can the world only be thought as its rejection or end; the end of the world is the world. To construct the world with a view to its end thus runs the risk of justifying the world as the only way it can and must be.
I do not intend to suggest that this issue is absolutely unresolvable; to suggest so would also mean to absolutize the world. In his later thinking, Schelling may be seen as attempting to approach this issue differently—to think the fact of the world without reproducing the way the world is. In his so-called identity philosophy, Schelling insists that the world is something that we have imposed upon ourselves and need simply to reject; that we need to begin not with striving but with the refusal of striving; that we need to remain where we already are, to remain in the now, which is what the world forecloses. There are not two “always already,” but only one. Essentially, we are never in the world. All finitude, temporality, relation, are already “annihilated in God.”10
The identity philosophy proclaims the finite world, this world of reflection and the relation between subject and object premised on their separation, to be an illusion (Schein) that only appears if we adopt the point of view of reflection in the first place—a product of our “finite” way of looking at things, which must “disappear” if we are to think what is Real.11 What is needed is to refuse to see the world that way: to re-vision the world as bliss, thereby annihilating it as world. There is but one being, an immanence common to all things; to see being otherwise—as divided—is to introduce division into it, to create the reality of which we then futilely strive to break free. To intuit this immanence-in-common is to see all things as simply being what they are—to see the pure “=” at the heart of everything, in which all distinctions between particular and universal, lower and higher, human and nonhuman disappear. Finite things may come into being and perish; but the “=” persists. In this, all divisions that make up the world are dissolved.12 To construct the true reality is to exhibit it indifferently, that is to say, without difference, relation, or striving.13
On the one hand, this is a more fruitful move: to unground the very transcendental conjunction—to see the world in which we modern subjects exist as one whose necessity is tied to the conditions of possibility that produce this world as necessary—in this case, a certain way of looking at the world (of producing it by envisioning it as a world of alienation and division) that, one could argue, becomes dominant with modernity.14 One could then investigate this conjunction historically, genealogically, or speculatively in order to destabilize it and to think a world not in terms of the transcendental knot. The transcendental is thereby made contingent or ungrounded. To expose this contingency is also to insist that the being that all things have in common, prior to the world thus produced, is where one already is, so that one must inhabit this common being and immanently refuse the world as unreal.
On the other hand, declaring this world to be an illusion, or perhaps something the absolute contingency of which needs to be exposed in order to think the Real or the event (for instance, to think with Meillassoux the coming of God as an eventuality that is absolutely contingent15), remains a problem insofar as it leaves the world free to haunt us. Insisting with Schelling on a being-in-common that the world divides, or with Meillassoux on the absolute of hyper-contingency that would allow us to think the event that “we might hope to see” one day,16 still does not answer the question of what to do about the fact of the world—and the fact that it is the way it is—a fact that, as it were, recedes into the background of any destabilization of the world as mere illusion or as absolutely contingent. The world is made into a ghost, and the more one tries to exorcize it or to inhabit that which has (or wants to have) nothing to do with it, or the more one leaves its conditions of possibility to a throw of the die, the longer the world continues its haunting: a spectral dilemma, though not quite in Meillassoux’s own sense—perhaps even a spectral knot.
Simply letting things be in order to immanently think absolute bliss runs the risk of simply leaving the world be, too. Similarly, to say that it is all up to an absolute, unmasterable contingency, may amount to justifying the world as merely (contingently) the way it is—to also simply letting it be. Contingency can do the work of legitimation as well: perhaps it is simply bad luck that the world is the way it is? Perhaps all we can do is hope for the lucky throw? Finally, to make the world into a ghost by proclaiming it to be illusory runs the risk of implying it can be simply refused—of trivializing the world’s violence, thereby also justifying the world. This is not to say there is no way to evade these pitfalls. However, upon this way, one has to tread a very thin line, behind which the world continues to loom and which cannot, it seems, be traversed without engaging with the world in some way. No matter how illusory or contingent the world is announced to be, one has to think of ways of dealing with it—with the fact of the world’s forceful imposition—if one does not want unwittingly to absolutize the world.
What to do about (or in) the world, too, remains a question with which Schelling continues to grapple. Elsewhere I have argued that the logic of highest agency (including moral agency) in Schelling’s so-called middle period amounts to acting out of absolute indifference—to simply enacting what is right or beautiful without caring about what the world proclaims to be possible.17 To act in such a way is to act in the world without relation to the world—an operativity that, for Schelling, completely disregards and, as it were, indifferently cuts through all worldly production and mediation. Moral virtue in particular is here no longer a matter of moral striving or progress, but a direct, immediate expression of the (soul’s or God’s) atemporal essence. “Let the [indifferent, blissful] soul act in you, or act through and through as a holy man”18—that is, one who acts, as Schelling points out in the Freedom essay, immediately out of the divine, out of “the highest resoluteness for what is right, without any choice.”19 In this state, the soul is immanent only to itself, so that morality, as the immediate expression of this immanence, operates without any deliberation and without relation to any context. It is atemporal in the sense of being without relation to the world’s temporality or regime of reproduction, instead directly enacting what is right. It does not negotiate or construe dialectical relationships with the world; it intervenes into it. Morality is indifferent to the world as it is while being operative in it. In this, one may be said to act in the world without legitimating it.
This, too, is a way of annihilating the world. The basic idea here may be seen as responding to the problem we saw in the early Schelling. Any agency that is supposed to break through this world of actualization and the not-yet must not itself be inscribed into or function as part of the process of actualization. Any activity that seeks to abolish the position of the world must not itself be represented as a position within the world. Accordingly, to ask whether such an agency is possible is to fall back into the logic of possibility and striving. Such an agency, then, fundamentally cannot be self-reflective or inquire into its own conditions of possibility (bypassing thereby the transcendental knot); it cannot relate to any particular configurations of the world; it cannot act toward any position or any telos. The way it (mindlessly) cuts through the world may best be likened to a forest fire or perhaps a flood. No wonder that Schelling compares it at once to divine love (Liebe) and divine wrath (Zorn)—a divine violence that needs, furthermore, to be powerful enough to disregard worldly possibility, even to obliterate it so it does not block its path.
Where is such absolute power to be found? To ask this question is to raise the crucial issue. The world, after all, does block one’s path. Even if we take the world, most radically, to be an illusion, its power—the violence it does, the hallucinations it produces, the fear it causes, the divisions it enacts—does not become any less real. Seeing as the world’s divisions have real power, it becomes a question of enacting a
